Samsung Galaxy Ring edges closer to launch – and I’m excited about its sleep-tracking potential
The Ring has now appeared in Samsung’s battery widget
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TheSamsung Galaxy Ringis one of the most hotly-anticipated gadgets of 2024 – and the smart ring has dropped another strong hint that it’s launching soon.
As spotted bySamMobile, the Galaxy Ring has now appeared inside ofSamsung’s stock Battery Widget (below). To see it yourself, you can add the widget to your Samsung phone’s homescreen and see the Galaxy Ring option in widget’s Settings menu – although it’s obviously pretty useless without the smart ring itself.
So what does this tell us about the Galaxy Ring’s launch date? Not a lot, apart from the fact that it’s seemingly still on track. SamMobile made the broad guess that it’ll be here in “a few weeks or months”, but some recent rumors have been a little more specific.
A recent report from The Elecoutlined the rough timescale we’re expecting. According to its sources, mass production of the Samsung Galaxy Ring will begin in May, with a full unveiling in July, followed by on-sale availability sometime in August.
That seems like a pretty likely timescale, given that Samsung’s next Unpacked 2024 is expected to take place in July and will also probably see in the arrival of theGalaxy Z Fold 6andZ Flip 6. But even as an iPhone owner, it’s the Galaxy Ring I’m most excited about…
What will the Ring actually do?
In recent weeks we’ve heard a few more hints about the Samsung Galaxy Ring’s potential talents, includingintegration with the Samsung Food app to help it serve up dietary suggestionsbased on your body mass index (BMI) and calorie consumption. That means we might need to go behind its back to maintain our biscuit habit.
But like most of thebest smart rings, the Galaxy Ring’s main feature is likely to be sleep-tracking. This was pretty clear from ourearly hands-on with Samsung’s wearable, with our briefing highlighting some of the metrics that smartwatches don’t typically cover, including resting heart rate during sleep, night movement, and sleep latency (or how quickly you doze off).
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The real benefit of smart rings is that they can track your sleep – in some respects, even better than smartwatches – but in a far less bulky, uncomfortable form factor than a watch. Samsung reckons this is about more than just figuring out how to get better shut-eye.
The company’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Hon Pak, told us in February that “sleep is a window to your health” and that “deep and REM sleep correlate strongly with dementia”. All of this sleep data will, as well as keep an eye on sleep health, also feed into a Vitality score to serve up insights about your physical and mental readiness for the day ahead.
For me, this justifies the hype around smart rings – it’s not a new wearable form factor for the sake of it, but one that has a purpose. I’ve long used basic smartphone apps like Sleep Recorder on iOS for basic sleep insights, but have never liked the idea of wearing myApple Watchduring the night.
Unfortunately for me, it looksunlikely that the Samsung Galaxy Ring will work with iPhones(initially, at least). So I’ll either need to switch to Android, get an Oura Ring or wait for Apple to develop a rival.
Right now, there are no rumors to suggest that an Apple Ring is at all imminent, but the early promise of the Galaxy Ring’s health-tracking powershopefully do make an Apple rival inevitable. It’s certainlyfiled enough patents around the concept, but we all know that means very little. The likely success of the Galaxy Ring this year might, though, change Apple’s mind.
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Mark is TechRadar’s Senior news editor. Having worked in tech journalism for a ludicrous 17 years, Mark is now attempting to break the world record for the number of camera bags hoarded by one person. He was previously Cameras Editor at both TechRadar and Trusted Reviews, Acting editor on Stuff.tv, as well as Features editor and Reviews editor on Stuff magazine. As a freelancer, he’s contributed to titles including The Sunday Times, FourFourTwo and Arena. And in a former life, he also won The Daily Telegraph’s Young Sportswriter of the Year. But that was before he discovered the strange joys of getting up at 4am for a photo shoot in London’s Square Mile.
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